There is no better illustration of Shanghai's paradoxical place in modern Chinese history than a museum in the city's Xintiandi district. Devoted to the first national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, inside the museum's quiet, low-lying stone building all is frugality and concern for the plight of the downtrodden. Wax figures of scrappy, earnest young communists gesticulate during a 1921 meeting frozen in time, debating how best to bring Marxism to China. Step outside the museum, however, and everything is Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Lululemon; the museum sits in the middle of one of Shanghai's most expensive shopping districts.

This fundamental contradiction -- Shanghai as the birthplace of Chinese communism and also the center of the country's capitalist development -- lies at the heart of Michael Dillon's "Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City." Mr. Dillon, a professor at King's College London and a prolific scholar of Chinese history and politics, writes here for the general reader and brings to his book an interest in the city that dates back to his undergraduate thesis on the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai, which he wrote in 1972.

The tension at the heart of Mr. Dillon's book is how Shanghai has both endured and thrived under communist rule in China. In a sense, this is the central irony of the People's Republic of China itself, at least since the Communist Party began promoting economic development in the late 20th century under the banner of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Shanghai was more than a challenge to communism, it was a puzzle for Chinese nationalists because its unique strength -- its economic power -- was born directly from China's weakness. During the 100 years from the First Opium War to World War II, Shanghai developed into one of the largest cities in the world and became China's leading commercial engine, powered by local labor while being governed and controlled by foreigners. In the words of one 1930s journalist quoted by Mr. Dillon, the glaring inequities of Shanghai in the 19th and early 20th centuries made it "a complete political ulcer on the face of China."

By the time Shanghai returned to Chinese control at the end of World War II, it had become (like Hong Kong would be after 1997) an almost alien entity within the country, a city with its own culture, its own instinct for business and a sense of its own cosmopolitan superiority to China's backward hinterland. It was a daunting prospect for the Chinese Communist Party when it took control in 1949. As Mr. Dillon puts it, to the eyes of a communist, Shanghai "was too big, had too high an opinion of itself, and had too long a history as a center of Chinese capitalism. Could it be trusted?"

The city has had its share of detractors. A Protestant missionary in the 1920s, horrified by its lascivious culture, is said to have declared that if God did not destroy Shanghai then he would owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. God did not take the missionary up on his challenge, but at various points in the book Mr. Dillon hints -- without giving sources, unfortunately -- that some of the more radical communists with a "puritanical and anti-urban bias" hoped to do the job themselves after 1949. In the end, though, the most radical change, after the initial communist takeover, was turning the old British racecourse into a park and public square.

Through the early decades of the People's Republic, the antagonism between outward-looking, business-oriented Shanghai and the center of the Communist government in Beijing played out most vividly in the Maoist campaigns of the 1950s and '60s. Mr. Dillon recounts how the Cultural Revolution unfolded in Shanghai, both in its local factions and the ideological struggle between Shanghai and the capital. The outcome is well-known: Capitalist Shanghai survived the Mao years and roared back to achieve great influence and riches, starting with Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening in the 1980s. Today it is again one of the least Maoist places you could imagine.

Mr. Dillon intersperses his more academic chapters with occasional descriptions of Shanghai's neighborhoods, temples and shops as they appear today. These sections will appeal to visitors who want more than what Lonely Planet or Instagram might give them.

Readers looking for a cultural history of Shanghai, however, will need to look elsewhere. While many books on the city's history dwell on the seedy, extravagant life of Jazz Age Shanghai ("louche and villainous," Mr. Dillon calls it), the author's interests lie more in the political realm. For the most part this book deals with institutions, policies, leaders, factions and organizations.

Some ground-level history does make its way in, as in two sections where Mr. Dillon discusses the work of Xue Baoqi, a 1960s photographer. Mr. Dillon's narrative descriptions of Xue's black-and-white photographs (the photos themselves, unfortunately, are not provided) give glimpses of ordinary people going about their lives in Shanghai before and during the Cultural Revolution -- the kind of imagery that is especially welcome in a book with many names but few faces.

The book could have benefited, too, from a stronger editor. Repetitions abound. It is interesting to know that Jiang Zemin was promoted to general secretary of the CCP after he successfully managed the democracy protests of 1989 in Shanghai without the bloodshed of Tiananmen Square, but we do not need to be told that seven times. Some sections are written without reference to what came earlier, so explanations are repeated and familiar individuals are introduced as if the reader has never heard of them.

Mr. Dillon's tone of clinical detachment -- from the horrors of the Mao years, for example -- can be disconcerting. In describing the Anti-Rightist Campaign -- in which multitudes of accused "rightists" were removed from their jobs, sent to labor reforms, imprisoned and, in many cases, executed or hounded to suicide -- Mr. Dillon writes simply that the movement "obliged Shanghai intellectuals to examine their own political attitudes" and "some lost their jobs as a result." Likewise, in his desire for balance he can seem more sympathetic to the Party than the norm. The vicious witch hunt against counterrevolutionaries in Shanghai during the Korean War comes across as a well-intentioned attempt to root out hidden subversives that eventually got out of hand but still led to a "great improvement in public order."

At its core, though, this is a compelling book that will resonate for many readers, especially those who share the author's interest in politics. "Shanghai is in no sense typical of China," Mr. Dillon writes. Yet in its uniqueness, the city embodies crucial aspects of China's long-term economic development and engagement with the world that are now central to the state's conception of itself.

--Mr. Platt, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of "Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 17, 2026 11:22 ET (15:22 GMT)

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